Florida Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
Rooms for Improvement: Florida Hotel Liability for Guest Injuries
There are nearly a half a million hotel rooms in Florida available to accommodate the hundreds of millions of out-of-state visitors welcomed to the Sunshine State each year. With an average occupancy rate of 70% and daily cost-per-room at around $138, hotel owners earn a pretty penny for their presence. Along with that prosperity comes the responsibility to prioritize guest safety. Florida hotel liability for guest injuries can be established in a court of law when there’s evidence the property owner/staff failed to use reasonable care in ensuring guest safety.
That doesn’t mean you automatically have a case just because you were injured or attacked and happened to be in a hotel. You must first prove negligence. That requires establishing the hotel’s duty of care to you, the ways in which they fell short in fulfilling that duty, and evidence of how you were harmed as a result.
Some examples of incidents that might give rise to a Florida hotel liability claim:
- Failure to fix a sidewalk out front (Ingress/Egress)
- Negligent hiring of a staffer with violent criminal background
- Inadequate security with failed locks, poor lighting, or understaffed/poorly trained security guards (particularly in areas with high crime rates)
- Failure to warn guests of a known or knowable danger
- Failure to address dangerous stairways, walkways, rugs, entrances, etc.
- Poorly maintained gym equipment
- Dated/inadequate swimming pool safety features
As our Key West, Florida hotel injury lawyers can explain, these types of personal injury/wrongful death cases fall under an area of law known as premises liability. Essentially, it allows people harmed by dangerous conditions on someone else’s property to pursue monetary damages.
As far as the exact standards to which property owners are held, some of it depends on the type/size/location of the hotel as well as where exactly the incident occurred. If it involved the hotel pool, for example, we’d be looking carefully at the building code requirements in Florida, as well as industry standard practices for commercial pool, and whether or not slip resistant materials were used. Questions will likely be raised about whether similar safety issues had cropped up in the past that would have alerted staff to the issue OR whether the danger had existed for so long that it should have been discovered by any property owner exercising reasonable care.
Another factor on which those standards may hinge is the relationship between the property owner/manager and the person hurt. Paying guests and members of the public welcomed onsite for the financial benefit of the owner are owed the greatest duty of care/highest level of protection. On the other end of the spectrum are trespassers, who generally aren’t owed any duty of care beyond restraint from active harm. There are exceptions for young kids who don’t know any better and are lured by some interesting but dangerous element of the property (attractive nuisance doctrine).
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